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Style Guide
GV Style Guide (preliminary): INTRODUCTION Welcome to the evolving GV Wiki style guide. For more information about GV's mission, author guidelines (both technical and substantive), an explanation of our editorial structure, plus a list of links to other how-to's please see our Author Resource Page. Weblog and Roundups Weblog is the right section of the blog. Any author at GV can post to the Weblog. Typically, the weblog entries are detailed reports and posts. Roundups section is the left panel. Only Regional Editors post to this section. Usually the roundups are a line or two long commentary on a post/ blog/ project with a link to the the same. Categories Within the WordPress interface, on the left side there are a bunch of categories. 1. Select kind of Post - Weblog, Roundups or Podcast. Unless you're a Regional Editor, you would be probably doing a Weblog or Podcast post. 2. Select geographical region and country. In case your post concerns more than one region/ country, please feel free to select more than one region/ country. 3. If the post is specific to certain other categories (such as Books, Photos, Ideas etc.), select these categories as well. Weblog Posts Post Title It's a good idea to provide an overall idea of the post in the title itself. It's generally a good idea to provide a little geographical context to the entry. Not everyone knows that Blog X covers country Y. So you could say "the Scotland-based blog What's Up, Pussycat points out that ..." Also, please remember that not everyone reading your writing will be as familiar with the geography that you're covering as you are. For example, "There was celebration in Vaduz, the capital city of Liechtenstein, as..." is far better than "There was celebration in Vaduz, as..." Likewise, "Reports out of the tiny Italian city-state of San Marino indicate..." is preferable to "Reports from San Marino say that..." Text styles in Posts Site names should be in italics; e.g. "I think that Global Voices is a really interesting blog" or "There was a [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/?p=212 really funny podcast on Global Voices yesterday]." In the unusual case where a blog or a site appears to be unnamed, use the the domain name or the blogger's name e.g. "Over at www.wrycatcher.com, Holden Caufield writes that..." or, alternatively, "Holden Caufield, on his blog, writes that..." The names--or nom de blogs--of bloggers should be in normal type. This also applies to bloggers who are not anonymous but are commonly known by their nom de blog, e.g. Instapundit or Atrios or mr.brown. When a nom de blog is synonymous with the site itself--again, e.g. Instapundit--there's no need to italicize the name. The only exceptions are if 1. you're specifically writing about the site itself and need to distinguish it from its creator. E.g. "Is Instapundit the site more important than Instapundit the man?" or 2. the post you're linking to was written by a guest blogger: "Jane Smith, guest-blogging on Instapundit, writes that...". Even then, you can get around it by writing something like "Jane Smith, who's guestblogging for the Instapundit this week, says that..." Titles of individual posts should be in "quotes". E.g. "in a post titled 'Why Whales?' in his blog The Pequod, blogger Ishmael explains why he decided to go to sea." Feel free to use Italic text or Bold text to create emphasis in posts. However, please do not use underlines, as that usually indicates a link and could be confusing for readers. Picture Posts For the title, use "Images from Countryname: Short Descriptive Slug". For example, "Images from Canada: Pancake Factory" or "Images from Hong Kong: Dim Sum Palace". Make sure that the image you want to post has a Creative Commons license. This is very, very, very important. In case the image doesn't have a CC license and you are very keen to use it, you could email the owner of the picture and get permission as well. A short caption at the bottom of the image, after the byline, can be very useful in providing clarifying context, particularly if the subject matter of the image isn't self-evident. Download the images from Flickr/ Any other site that hosts the photo: click on the 'All Sizes' button above the image to get the largest, highest quality images. Resize the image to no more than 350 pixels wide, then upload it to GV. Here's some sample HTML you can use: "TITLE OF PICTURE" by PHOTOGRAPHER'S NAME Roundups Roundup Post Title To standardize the titles of the roundup posts, the following format is used: Country: Summary This format makes the reading of posts easier in the RSS feeds.(e.g. "China: Blog sites locked down", or "Canada: Critical Maple Syrup Shortage Threatens Economy"). You can also use the title of the link you're posting to as the summary, if it's not too long. If you're using the "Press-It" bookmarklet, Link posts are automatically titled with the title of the post you're linking to--just add the country name at the beginning. Picking Posts For The Roundups This is something that I've been rolling around inside my head for a while now, and I'm not sure that I can come up with a comprehensive system for how I do it. But here's a first shot at explaining how I do it: 1. The first thing I look for are posts that are "interesting". What "interesting" in this context means are posts that are communicate effectively and aren't usually about the daily mundane routine of life. Of course, if they're blogging from a particularly interesting place--i.e. a refugee camp, a war zone, or the epicenter of a natural disaster--the daily mundane routine of life is generally neither mundane nor routine, so those often make good posts to link to, since they provide a window into life under unusual and often trying circumstances. Also, "communicate effectively" doesn't always mean "conforms to The Elements of Style definition of good writing". The Kenyan Democracy Project is a great example of unconventional writing that still communicates very effectively. 2. I try to avoid what I call "cheese sandwich posts", which are posts along the lines of "I woke up and was hungry so I ate a cheese sandwich. It was tasty." I'm certainly guilty of writing many "cheese sandwich posts" on my own blog. However, what would differentiate a "cheese sandwich post", for the purposes of GV, would be if the blogger explained that she used a local cheese that was only made in her village using a technique that had been unchanged for thousands of years, and how that was important to the local culture, and how until recently, the only person left who knew the secret was a wizened old woman who had jealously refused to part with the recipe until she was on her deathbed, and now the village is experiencing a rebirth because of incredibly high demand for this particular cheese from four-star chefs overseas. 3. The above is the long way of trying to say "posts that provide insight into local culture and customs". I'm not big on ethnographic tours: "Hi, I'm Jim Slade, and today we're going to look at the exotic Hong Kong custom of dim sum for lunch!" but prefer pieces that explain custom and culture in context of everyday life: "I met my gung-gung (grandfather) for dim sum today. He's being coming to the same dim sum restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui for 40 years. It's a Hong Kong tradition...." 4. Issues that affect blogs and blogging. These range from the very serious--free speech, bloggers and writers being arrested and thrown in jail--to the social--blog meetups and the like--to the silly. Efforts to increase local-language blogospheres are always welcome news, as are mentions of local blog-related software efforts (i.e. translating Wordpress into a new language). This also includes sites that do regular blog roundups, though if a site does it on regular basis, I don't think there's a need to link to every roundup it does. I tend to stay away from blog feuds, since publicizing grudges and name-calling spats tends to be not terribily constructive. 5. Important local stories that are under-reported in the western/mainstream press. The example I like to use is that Bolivian blogs were writing about mass demonstrations/riots in La Paz nearly a week before they were picked up in the New York Times. The demonstrations ended up toppling the then-president and set the stage for new Presidential elections. Having said that, I've not been too big a fan of pointing to blogs that simply repost AP/AFP/Reuters wire stories with little or no original commentary (and for the record, I don't think that "I liked this story: text of AP story" really counts as original commentary). What counts as important? Well, that's up to you. The government is about to be overthrown? Probably important. Local adult film star gets speeding ticket? Probably not. 6. Posts that do provide original commentary on published material in the western/mainstream media. Generally "I think this NYT story is wrong/right/partly right" doesn't count, but "I think this NYT story is wrong/right/partly wrong for the following reasons..." is good. 7. Blogs that translate material--either from local-language media or local-language blogs--into English. This is really very useful for us, since it's almost impossible to know what, say, the Korean-language blogosphere has to say about the Six Party talks without a translated guide. 8. The lighter side: it's good to slip a not-so-serious story into the mix every now and again. This includes sports stories, particularly if it's of national importance (e.g. Bangladesh besting world power Australia in cricket). This is also important to show that the countries that bloggers are writing about aren't all about politics and power struggles. I'm probably guilty of posting about too many of these stories... I guess that one of the general principles that I'm trying to express here is that we're trying to let the people of the world tell their stories in their own words, rather than have their stories get filtered through a journalistic filter. ---- See also GV Author Resources